Edwina Trentham

Edwina Trentham was born in Bermuda, where she spent most of her childhood. An Etherington Scholar, she received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She won an honorable mention in Hill-Stead Museum’s 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival's National Competition and was a featured reader at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in 2005. She has been a fellow at Yaddo and given many readings throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.

About her first book of poetry, Stumbling into the Light (Antrim House 2004), Robert Cording has written, “Edwina Trentham’s autobiographical sequence of poems is as painful, loving, and surprising as family life itself. Acutely observant, generous and rich in their details, these mature, accomplished poems ‘sift the clutter’ of memory to recall the often concealed and contradictory truths that lie at the heart of her upbringing in Bermuda.” Her work has been published in several journals, including Massachusetts Review and Prairie Schooner.

Edwina is a Professor of English at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, CT, teaching literature, composition and creative writing. 1989-2005, she was a visiting instructor in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she taught courses in women's poetry, memoir and political poetry. She is the founding editor of Freshwater, a national poetry journal, and founder and organizer of the Freshwater Poetry Festival,both of which celebrated a tenth anniversary in 2009. Annually, she and her student editors read over 2,000 poems submitted to the magazine from throughout the United States and Europe .

She has one son, Ben, who lives in Seattle. Edwina and her husband Greg Coleman, a labyrinth designer, poet and Tai Chi instructor, live in Moodus, Connecticut .

Edwina is a recipient of a 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship funded through the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Fund and the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and administered by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.